The King is dead, long live the Queen

THE first day of the Queen’s reign dawned quietly enough, if a trifle oddly, as it found her 30ft up a tree. The then Princess Elizabeth was at Treetops, the famous hotel in Kenya where guests stay in cabins carved out of wild fig trees overlooking the water holes where the big game come to drink.

It was a stopover on the long-haul journey to Australia and New Zealand for a royal tour that her father, King George VI, was not well enough to undertake.

Along with her husband Philip, Duke of Edinburgh, Princess Elizabeth had been relaxing for a few days at the nearby Sagana Royal Lodge, a wedding gift from the Kenyan people, before travelling the 17 miles to Treetops to see the wildlife.

Dressed in slacks and an apricot-coloured blouse she was soon busy with her cine-camera and before sunset had filmed baboons in the branches, elephants and the clash of horns between two rival water buck.

She had slept in the cabin and was up at dawn to film rhino. By then she had become Queen, although she did not know it until the day was more than half gone.

As the Queen left Treetops, Britain was three hours behind. At Sandringham, the royal country home in Norfolk where the King had been staying since before Christmas, it was 7.30am and valet James McDonald began preparing the King’s morning bath.

The job finished, McDonald went through to the bedroom with the King’s morning tea.

Having had drastic surgery for lung cancer the previous September, the King seemed to be recovering. He had made the brief return trip to see his daughter fly off from London and only the day before had been out shooting on royal estate land near the village of Flitcham with his friend and neighbour, Lord Fermoy.

Wearing battery-heated boots and gloves, he was out in the wintry sunshine from half-past nine until dusk, bagging nine hares and a wood pigeon. “He was at the top of his form,” Lord Fermoy would report the next day. “He ate a hearty lunch, talking and laughing the whole time.”

The King himself called it: “The best day’s shooting I’ve had in a long time.” and told Fermoy: “We’ll go out again on Thursday.”

Back at Sandringham, the King rested for a while in his ground-floor bedroom before going to the nursery to spend time with his grandchildren Charles, three, and Anne, a toddler of 18 months. He had dinner with his wife and younger daughter, Princess Margaret, listened to the BBC 9 o’clock news on the wireless and strolled for a short time on the terrace before going to bed.

He was alive and awake at around midnight when a police constable patrolling the grounds heard him either opening or closing his bedroom window.

USUALLY the small sounds his valet made drawing the bath were sufficient to rouse the King but not this morning. McDonald went back into the bathroom and made more splashing sounds with the water but the King still did not stir. Alarmed, he sought help and together with royal page Maurice Watts, they went back to the King’s bedroom. When their joint efforts failed to wake him, they knew something was terribly wrong.

A telephone call summoned doctor James Ansell from his home at Wolferton, three miles away. The King, he confirmed, had died in his sleep.

In Kenya with only a single telephone line linking Royal Lodge to the outside world, the Queen knew nothing of this, nor would she know for several more hours yet and then only by word of mouth.

At 1.45pm Kenyan time, with storm clouds brewing over Nyeri, a small township a few miles from Sagana, the telephone rang in one of the two booths in the Outspan Hotel. Granville Roberts, a journalist covering the royal visit for the East African Standard, answered, to find his own office calling. He felt “a strange tingling in my scalp” as he was told: “A flash has just come in from Reuters. It reads: The King is Dead.”

“Hold on a moment,” Roberts said. Calling to the receptionist, he said: “Fetch Colonel Charteris, please. He’s in the dining room. Tell him to hurry.”

Lieutenant Colonel, the Honourable Martin Charteris, was private secretary to the young woman he still thought of as Princess Elizabeth. Roberts spoke again into the telephone. “Are you sure the message is correct?”

“Quite sure,” was the reply. “There’s more. The King died in his sleep. Message ends.”

Charteris appeared and Roberts beckoned him into the booth, closing the door before delivering the news. Charteris, according to Roberts, “seemed to sag visibly and murmured, ‘My poor dear lady.' ”

The call to Royal Lodge was made initially by Roberts and was answered by Commander Michael Parker, Philip’s wartime friend and now his private secretary. “Good God,” was his response. Charteris took the phone and Parker told him they must have official confirmation before breaking it to the Queen.

Switching on the wireless was all it took. Parker finally received confirmation from the BBC, which had interrupted its scheduled programme for the solemn voice of John Snagge to make the official announcement of the King’s death at 11.15am, British time.

With no longer any cause for doubt, he hurried to where the Duke of Edinburgh was taking an after-lunch nap, roused him and broke the news.

So it was afternoon in Kenya when Philip told his wife of her father’s death and the realisation dawned on her that she was now Queen. She went into her bedroom and closed the door behind her. It was nearly an hour before she was seen again.

When she emerged her face was pale and it was clear she had been crying. However, her sorrow had to give way to royal duty as Queen of the United Kingdom and several other nations around the world, head of the Commonwealth, Supreme Governor of the Church of England and much else besides.

All this had descended on her totally unexpectedly and years earlier than she had anticipated. It was an awesome burden for a woman of 25.

Huge though the responsibility was, it was a role to which she had been trained from the age of 10. Her father had been so unprepared for the role, that he once declared: “I have never even seen a state paper.” As a result, he resolved that his daughter should be better prepared.

The Queen sat at her desk to compose messages of condolence to be cabled to her mother and grandmother.

Incoming calls clogged the single telephone line and when London finally called, one of the questions asked was in what name she would reign. “My own, of course,” said the Queen. “What else?”

Parker had the task of arranging the flight back to London. Luckily the Argonaut, in which the party had flown to Kenya, was on stand-by at Entebbe, waiting to take back any surplus luggage. A call to East Africa Airlines saw a Dakota airborne to Nanyuki, the nearest airfield to Royal Lodge, to take the royal party to the aircraft.

Even amid all this activity, the new Queen still found time for the smaller courtesies of royalty. She sent for the District Commissioner and presented him with a pair of cufflinks bearing her personal cypher.

The packing was done in an hour, although in the rush one or two things were overlooked. Philip’s field glasses were later found in a drawer of the bureau.

Just before 6pm, Kenyan time, they were ready to leave. Daylight was fading and another storm brewing as they reached Nanyuki to board the Dakota.

The storm broke as they landed at Entebbe, so violent that the Argonaut couldn’t take off. If was nearly midnight before the weather eased sufficiently for them to become airborne on the 4,000 mile flight back to London.

ON BOARD, there was a problem. The Queen’s mourning outfit, without which members of the Royal Family never travel, had gone on ahead of her and was in the luggage already aboard the liner Gothic. She was flying home in a light summer frock, ideal for Kenya but hardly suitable for her arrival in London.

The problem was solved by landing at a staging post in North Africa. From there a wireless message was sent to London and a second mourning outfit was hastily packed and taken to London Airport.

Arriving in London the Argonaut landed briefly, well away from the dignitaries waiting to greet her. The mourning outfit was smuggled aboard and the Queen made a quick change as the pilot taxied.

The line-up waiting to welcome her was headed by her uncle, the Duke of Gloucester, Philip’s uncle, Earl Mountbatten, and prime minister Winston Churchill, tears streaming unashamedly down his cheeks.

“This is a very tragic homecoming,” said the Queen. Tragic indeed but also the start of a reign that may yet turn out to be the longest in British history.

Adapted in part from Elizabeth, Queen & Mother by Graham and Heather Fisher, published 1964.